Over the past month, we’ve been publishing Passwords 101 lessons to Facebook and Twitter. It’s now time to apply what you’ve learned to your everyday lives, at work and at school. Of course, you could give your brain a workout and keep all these strong and unique passwords stored inside your head, but 1Password is the best way to make security simple. We’re making it easier for you to get started: 1Password is now on sale across all platforms! Save 30% on 1Password for Mac and Windows, and 50% on 1Password for iOS and Android.

Do we have any stragglers or class cutters among us? No worries! Let’s review what we covered over the past few weeks.

Password length

Ah, back to school season! This is Passwords 101. Time to put away the old password books & use a random generator! pic.twitter.com/YsY5nAoCP6

Length is not the only thing that will keep an attacker from figuring out your passwords, but it’s significant. 1Password makes it super easy to generate unique, long passwords; but equally important, it remembers them for you so that you don’t even have to think about trying to recall a lengthy phrase.

Personal information is NOT for passwords

Time for a new Passwords 101 lesson! If you can find your password in a social media search, so can the bad guys. ? pic.twitter.com/pZ8iOwmA5X

It’s scary how easy it is for a determined person to find personal information about anyone on the Internet. For this reason, it’s best to keep such information out of your passwords. If your password is 30 characters long and 25 of them have some personally identifiable information, that leaves only 5 random characters! To protect your accounts, make sure that there’s zero personal information in your passwords.

Substitutions are not secure

Page 404 in your Passwords 101 book says replacing an A with a 4 does nothing for security. Random is the way to go! pic.twitter.com/PBTiNEPQM2

When 1Password first started teaching me about password security, I thought I was really clever when I changed letters to numbers and symbols. They resembled the letters enough that I wouldn’t make mistakes when entering the passwords from memory. Totally secure, right? Unfortunately, no. It turns out that the bad guys are also very clever, and they account for this in their attacks! The best thing is to have 1Password generate truly random passwords for you.

Never reuse passwords

This is the most important lesson yet! Passwords should never be reused across sites and services. Keep them unique! pic.twitter.com/CmyiqRLVJm

Sometimes the simplest lessons are the most important. It’s a no-brainer: if you use the same password across accounts, access to one equals access to all. That is as convenient for an attacker as it is for you! Instead, let 1Password generate and remember a unique password for each account.

As always, this is a limited time sale. Get back to school in style and ensure that you’re working smarter, not harder. If you have any questions, Professor Bits’s office door is always open. Leave a comment here or join us in the forums; we love to hear from you.